%!TEX root = ./HDG_report.tex
\section{Discussion}\label{discussion}

With our game, our initial goal was to make a competitive game where the player would carefully discern and analyze the sounds before making a choice. However, the result has proven to be something quite different. During the development of the demo, we found that the dynamics of the game had shifted slightly from our original intentions. As mentioned, there are several issues - the enemy AI is not very sophisticated and even though the parameter mapping works adequately, it is not always obvious how a certain sound will manifest itself into a weapon. All this turned out to be of lesser importance, as our source-descriptor model quickly showed great potential for emergent results.

The game rules are implemented as described, and some weapons are ultimately better against others, but this turned out not to be the deciding factor when choosing weapons. Some weapons attain a stronger ``personality'' than others, both in sound and appearance, oftentimes far removed their actual usefulness. More than once, we found ourselves choosing sounds based on their aesthetic qualities, not really thinking about battle performance. As noted, this might also be due to fact that the enemy AI is not particularly hard to beat\footnote{Following up on this issue, it might be interesting to create a version of this game where two human players battle against each other.}.

\begin{figure}[htp]
	\centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.9\columnwidth]{images/widewrapper.png}}
	\caption{Example of a unusual weapon}
	\label{everythinghighgrainrate}
\end{figure}
 
The factors that make an interesting weapon are hard to predict, as they occur randomly, and usually it is the unexpected and unheard sounds that grab the attention of the player. However, often the weapons themselves tend to be quite similar, not usually meeting the expectations created from hearing it's associated sound. This might indicate that our simple 1:1 mapping of parameters between weapon and sound is bit too primitive, as there are many subtle spectral details that only occur in as the parameters combine in various ways.

Future work would first involve doing a much more thorough investigation of the currently included granular parameters, the synergy between them and how this affects the resulting sound of a descriptor. The next challenge would then be to abstract these into parameters that would enable both easy and flexible interpolation between them. Extensive experimentation and the assistance of someone who has profound knowledge and experience with granular synthesis would be necessary to enhance the system. While there exists technical, in-depth descriptions of each parameter, they do not really provide much insight into the associative and perceptual qualities of the results. Another improvement could also be made on the analysis step, were one could extract more spectral information from the selected grain in order to further inform the synthesis.

After refining the space weapon model, the next natural step is to apply variations of the model on other subdomains. One example could be the musical instruments in the game score. At some point it might even be possible to find a unified model that could work for a wide variety of sounds. For use in a game development scenario, it would also be necessary to abstract the actual granular parameters with more user friendly metrics e.g. noisy, wobbly, staccato, etc.




